It’s everywhere that stuff isn’t (possibly). But can your brain handle that? Mine can’t.
‘Nothing’ is a pronoun (indefinite in kind),
So it must refer to something, and that really hurts my mind.
It’s what the beggar, Porgy, in Charleston’s Catfish Row,
Had plenty of (and sang of, so folks around would know).
It’s inside every atom, the physicists declare,
Which means it’s very nearly every-blooming-where:
The universe, for instance, is pretty full of nowt.
So Porgy was quite right, there’s lots of it about!
Abhorred by Mother Nature, it fills a vacuum’s space;
Life signifies it, Bill said, in quite another place1;
Lord Goring’s favourite subject was nothing, to be sure2;
And it’s what to give a person who has it all, and more.
But how can there be nothing? Why doesn’t space collapse?
Could it be that scientists don’t know it all? Perhaps.
‘Dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ are strange hypotheses,
And ‘nothing’ is another: they’re all still mysteries.
1.William Shakespeare gave this line to Macbeth, in Scene V of the play of that name: “[Life] is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
2. In Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Act 1: “I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.”]